Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

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Photos:Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

Researchers are investigating the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD and magic mushrooms.

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Photos:Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

Psilocybin -- the active ingredient in magic mushrooms -- could be used during controlled therapy to treat depression. The psychoactive is thought to enable people to confront and make sense of the world.

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Photos:Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

The methods the brain uses to organize information and interpret the world are disrupted under the influence of psilocybin, which results in hallucinations. High-level thinking becomes disjointed while brain regions to do with emotional thinking become more active.

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Photos:Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

Scientists are trialling both meditation and psychedelic drugs as potential treatments due to their perspective-altering effect on the mind.

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Photos:Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

Meditation can be extremely challenging for a novice, so the idea behind one study is to reveal whether psychedelics offers a similar change in perspective and, if so, use them as an alternative therapy or even use them as a gateway into meditation.

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Using brain scanning and other techniques, researchers at Imperial College London were recently able to show what happens when someone takes LSD.

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Photos:Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

Participants' brains lit up with activity after taking the drug. Researchers hope the findings may help towards developing treatments for depression or addiction.

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Photos:Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

Researchers at Imperial College London also previously scanned the brain to see the effects of MDMA. Their findings hint that the drug might be useful in the treatment of anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

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Photos:Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

MDMA was first synthesized in Germany in 1912, before it became a party drug in the 1980s. It's being studied by MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) to see whether MDMA-assisted psychotherapy could help people with psychological or emotional damage.

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Photos:Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

When people suffer from depression, their "default mode network" becomes over-connected, causing them to be locked into a state of rumination where they cannot stop thinking negative thoughts. Psilocybin could be used to liberate them from these depressive symptoms.

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Photos:Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

Addictive behaviors, such as smoking, could also be targeted using cognitive behavioral therapy combined with psilocybin. Initial small-scale studies have seen 80% success rates.

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Photos:Can meditation and psychedelics have the same benefits for your mind?

Alcoholism is also being targeted by researchers at the University of New Mexico, and early studies have seen an improved level of treatment in people who received psilocybin alongside counseling compared with those who received only counseling.

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From psychedelics showing potential as psychotherapies and meditation reducing stress an anxiety -- could these perspective-altering practices become mainstream medicine?